On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 18:19, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> What matters to me is [b]documentation[/b], however it's preserved. I'm > often faced with a bit of old data and I need to know the details upon > which it was fabricated. That has value to me. Al K has been > invaluable in this respect. I collect all the documentation I can find (including my own old notes when I can find them). It's really hard to figure out exactly how something works when documentation is lost and there's nobody around with the knowledge. When I visited Ise shrine in Japan some years ago they were in the middle of building a completely new wooden bridge beside the existing one. They were building new temples as well. Turned out that every twenty years they routinely rebuild *everything*, including the items inside the temples and buildings. Then they tear down the old ones (and use the old material at other sites around the country). And still they claimed that the temples. bridges, items etc. had been there since around 1200 AD. I was a bit baffled about this, but when I had lunch in the nearest town a waiter noticed the foreigner and gave me a booklet to read. It was all explained there. It's simple enough: What they feel as important to preserve is the knowledge about how to build these things. The craftmanship and the artistry. 20 years is just about right - it's enough to hand over the craft to another generation, with overlap. And they've been doing this for hundreds of years. So, what is worth preserving is the *howto*, not the actual old things which would just detoriate more and more over time and eventually disappear. That's just "stuff", and immaterial, as it were. And, as I once witnessed a Viking ship replica going under in bad weather due to something not fully correct in the understanding of exactly how to construct a specific part of the bottom of the ship, I can fully appreciate the thinking. Knowledge gained over hundreds of years in wooden ship building can be lost over a generation or two, even if there's still a parallel tradition of building other types of boats. Which turned out not to be enough to understand how it was done. It can be painfully difficult to recreate, figure out, and document something that's lost, even if you have an old original in bad shape to look at. Which is why they've worked for decades at e.g. Roskilde in Denmark to recreate the knowledge. And the last time I visited that site they still couldn't build as well as the old builders, there was a newly built replica of a small boat where they had a beatifully preserved original nearby - the original still looked better. Give them a decade or two more, and it'll improve I'm sure.